


Madness, or magic

by coffeeandoranges



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Canon What Canon, Child Abandonment, F/M, Force Ghosts, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-04
Updated: 2016-12-04
Packaged: 2018-09-06 09:41:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8745268
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coffeeandoranges/pseuds/coffeeandoranges
Summary: Jyn Erso believes in the Force, even when it tells her to leave her daughter on Jakku.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This started out as a crack theory about Rey's Parentage (tm) and then I got legit feelings. The minute I saw Felicity Jones's face in the Rogue One trailers, I needed her to be Rey's mother and did not care how it would work or what gods we needed to please. I also needed her to be a Skywalker even though Luke is gay and ace. You see my dilemma.

The field, the wind, the director’s cape. 

Her father’s bound hands. 

Jyn Erso thought she had buried the memories forever but she hasn’t. They are swimming before her. They are the reason she knows what she knows what she is doing now. She _knows_ what it means to lose a parent when you are small.

Children, young as they are, experience abandonment as a kind of death. It is a terror encoded into the limbic systems of every mammalian species. The provider withdraws her hand and you starve. You are soft and can’t run to save yourself. Everything you have, everything you will be, proceeds from the heartbeat you feel within the cage of her chest, a _mother_ , godlike to a developing brain. 

 _I never wanted this for you_ , _Rey._

Her child is in her arms. 

Her husband is at her back, trying to deflect. 

Her child cries.

Jyn could almost cry herself but she is dehydrated from running, from crash-landing on this desert planet and fleeing laser blasts, feeling them singe her shoelaces and fly hot by her cheek.        

“It’s alright, darling,” Jyn says into her hair. Not the first of several lies she has told today.

“Cassian!” she cries out as a blaster bolt lands close enough to them to ruffle her daughter’s hair. “Your helmet!”

Cassian is working behind her, quick footwork, but steady with his hands as he returns every bolt with a sting of his own, his aim honed from years of rebellion. Watching him, Jyn feels a stir of what she has always felt for him– trust, simple and yet. More than that. A good man. A great father. It isn’t fair. He has always been her shield. She has always been rushing them into danger. Now– today– is the first time she’s ever run away. 

Cassian pauses a half-second when he hears her. Long enough for a beam of energy to strike him at the ankle. He winces at the pain. No matter. He is a seasoned soldier, as is she. He doesn’t lose a second. He pulls off the helmet he has worn since before the Death Star, the one he painted with the hollow bell of the Rebellion, now red and faded, and he hands it to her. 

Jyn puts it over her daughter’s head.

Momentarily her wailing stops. Rey has always been an observant child, more curious than fearful, and this is a new thing. Jyn wonders if wearing the helmet has a sensory effect on her, if it helps cut down the wild, colorful world her daughter lives in to more manageable proportions. 

She hopes it makes her feel safe. 

A burst of brilliant light over the crest of the hill: they are finally over the peak of the enormous dune where their ship crashed. It is time to make up speed. Jyn and Cassian run full-tilt on the downslope.

Her heart is beating faster now. It seems like they may be reaching safer ground– at the bottom of the dune are the outskirts of a small city, or what passes for it on Jakku.

There is a market and there are awnings, and for several minutes of chaos Cassian is gripping her hand while they duck under stalls and dodge blue patches of sky– hiding from anywhere they might be seen or shot. 

There are shouts all around them as the TIE fighters sweep the market. Then seconds pass, and then a full minute.

The TIEs circle overhead, fire a single cautious shot. Another.

Jyn is sure that from above the marketplace looks like a kicked ant pile, with the Erso-Andors now no more distinguishable than any other being scurrying to safety.  

As if realizing they have lost their target, some commander gives the order to pull back, and the TIEs break formation, climbing into the atmosphere.

They have a moment now, and they need to make the most of it. Jyn crouches behind a stall, throwing an arm out to catch Cassian. Running all day now, hiding in the empty cargo cells, stealing fighter after fighter from their own army, they are used to using every ounce of momentum they can gain. Jyn realizes suddenly she is soaked with sweat. Her calves and toes ache from climbing sand, trying to find a foothold as they made it over the dune.

She takes a moment to feel, as she always does, a rush of hope– they’re not dead yet.

But this time it fails to invigorate her. None of it has been the same, not since she became a mother. Gone are the days she could sail away laughing from a battle. 

“She alright?” Cassian asks, panting. He doesn’t wait for an answer, lifting the child out of her arms. 

Cassian’s eyelids flutter closed as he holds Rey. Jyn drinks in the sight of them, their child wrapped in her husband’s arms, perhaps for the last time. 

 _No, it will not be the last. We are coming back, Rey. I promise you that. I swear it on my father’s grave._   

Jyn puts away some of the terror that had been looming over them ever since this hellish day began. (3:30 in the morning, it had been. An alarm going off. “All pilots to their station,” blared across the ship, words almost choked with static from economy-grade speakers.) 

Although a pilot, Cassian hadn’t responded to the call to scramble. Cassian Andor’s first-ever dereliction of duty, as far as she knew. But they’d had a different mission.

The last thing Jyn had seen before the ship they’d stolen fell screaming into orbit had been the Millenium Falcon, that old war rig of the Rebellion, hyperdrive glowing as it exited hyperspace. Jyn can picture how the rest of the battle must have gone from there: she could almost see Han Solo skimming the cruiser, drawing fire from away the Republic flagship. From his wife and child.

She could almost see his boy’s face scrunched up at the port window: Ben Solo, Prince of Alderaan, about fourteen years old. He was studying with Luke Skywalker already. In a few years he might have shared a classroom with Rey. She wonders what it would have been like to watch her daughter train with the greatest living Jedi.    

Jyn _hurts,_ abruptly, and there’s no time to feel it. Jyn is good at saying goodbye-- or thought she was. But this is not goodbye, it is _until we meet again._

_Isn’t it?_

What would Rey think of her when they met again? What could she possibly have to say to them by then?

_Sorry your parents karked up, Rey. We didn’t mean it, honest._

Jyn is disgusted at herself and trying to think of what to say to Rey—how to say anything meaningful, with the magnitude of the betrayal she is about to commit-- and there’s no time left.

“How long do we have?” Cassian asks her, as if reading her mind.

Shaking, Jyn pulls out her commlink. There are 16 missed calls and another is incoming now. She presses the button to accept.

“I saw you with the girl,” says the tiny blue figure of Unkar Plutt, without preamble. He appears solid, like the transmission is from close by. “You were lucky.” 

“The Force was with us,” Jyn replies. She feels a shiver rising to her skin, and suppresses it. “And they were aiming to capture, not kill.”  

“She must be valuable, this girl of yours,” Unkar Plutt says.

His beady eyes are alight with something Jyn doesn’t like. 

“She is _my_ daughter,” Jyn says sharply. “I stole the plans for the first Death Star. You know how the First Order likes to settle Imperial scores.”

She feels a stab of disgust as she looks at him, daring him to provoke her further, but he does not. 

“Turn on your location,” he says instead. “I’ll find you.” 

Jyn hangs up and does as he says.

“He is near us,” Cassian says. His cheeks are red, the way they get when he is angry but doesn’t want to admit it, and his eyes are shining with an idea.

“But there’s still time,” he tells her. “We don’t have to do this, Jyn, we can leave, the battle is over and I know a quiet route from here to–”

Jyn shakes her head. “We can’t.”

“You really do believe it then.” Cassian looks miserably sad.

“I do. I don’t know why.”

There is so much she wants to say to Cassian, like  _my mother raised me to believe in the Force_  and  _every end is a beginning_  and  _she will be in our hearts always_  and she will say it all later because she doesn’t believe those words right now, not when she looks at Rey.

But the moment she found out she would have to hide Rey, when she felt the knowledge of what could happen to her daughter hit her all at once, inevitable, with the same multidimensional clarity the human brain creates in the last three seconds before a crash landing, she knew she  _must_ give up her daughter. It is the only way she will survive. She’d _known_ it. Her own small Force sensitivity, rearing its head once again. Fate had given Jyn Erso a brutal education in listening to that voice.

Cassian is not like her, he’s calm, never follows hunches or makes wild leaps of faith.

It is why she loves him but it’s also why she can’t explain why believes in dreams that tell her she has to leave their child on Jakku.

“You think I don’t _know_ what we’re doing?” Jyn says, her terror for Rey spiking. “That I don’t care what this is like for her? My own father–”

She interrupts herself, her mind flooded with images from the nightmares she’s had for months now.

Every night she watches her father die again and every night new horror dawns over the long-familiar scene as he is replaced with Rey.

She will not let it happen.

“I know, Jyn,” Cassian says softly. “I believe you.”

“Let me hold her,” she pleads Cassian, trying to reign herself in.  

She knows children– if she is calm Rey will be calm– and she doesn’t want to squander their last moments with tears, but she can’t hold it back anymore. Rey starts crying the instant she does.

“I love you,” Jyn says. Her daughter looks more beautiful than ever and the words are empty, empty. “I promise you. We will come back for you.”     

There is the soft whine of an engine as Unkar Plutt pulls up to them in a speeder. 

Rey begins to scream. 

“Listen, Rey,” Jyn says, urgency in her voice. She pulls a datapen from her pocket. “Every day we are gone, you mark down another scratch. When we come back, for every scratch you’ve made, your Mum will give you another hug and kiss.” 

Rey’s hand curls around the datapen and her little features tighten in concentration.

_Good._

_A distraction._  

“Every scratch,” Jyn says softly.

She tugs on one of her daughter’s buns, trying to make her smile. It doesn’t work. The girl just looks lost, her eyes enormous, dark, absorbing– 

Cassian’s hand comes from behind to cup the back of Rey’s head one last time. The gentleness of the gesture makes her chest ache.  

“Our precious girl,” he says, choking up himself. “We love you so much.”

“Is the girl ready?” Unkar Plutt’s voice calls out. She holds Rey closer as he approaches.

The junk trader—and one-time informant for the Rebellion--is an ugly being, hulking and massive, his face an expression of greed, but even aside from that, Jyn recoils from the smell of him. He has a memorable stench. She wonders if he will hurt her daughter and then, with a flash of insight, she is positive he will try. 

“If you so much as touch one hair on her head, I will know,” she tells Plutt.

“Wouldn’t dream of it, Sergeant,” he says. The leer in his eyes vanishes, replaced by something neutral and false.                                                                     

“Come,” he says to the girl. Turning to Jyn and Cassian, he gestures to his speeder. It looks dilapidated. “In return, as we discussed, you may take this to the spaceport. The Republic is doing a sweep of survivors. Reckon they’ll pick you up if you hurry.”

Cassian takes the wheel, a small kindness for which Jyn is grateful, for it provides her one more moment with Rey.

She holds her daughter, inhaling the clean scent of her hair, feeling her soft skin. With a stab deep in her chest, she wonders how fast this Force-forsaken planet will toughen her up. She hands Unkar Plutt the datapen, Cassian’s helmet, and then she pulls out her final gift for Rey– a doll that looks like a Rebellion pilot. 

“Everything I do, I do to protect you,” she says, not knowing what else to say. It is as true now as it was when her father said it. Nothing she says will ever be enough anyway. She knows. She tastes bitterness at the back of her throat. Who knew they would still be here, giving up children to protect them from evil, ten years after Endor.

Then she places Rey on the ground beside Plutt, doll and pen in her hand, hair in three buns, and climbs on the back of the speeder behind her husband. 

Plutt’s paw swallows up her daughter’s tiny hand.

Then Jyn’s breath catches in her throat. At the edge of her vision, she sees a glimmer in the desert air.  

“He’s here,” she says into her husband’s ear.

“As he should be,” says Cassian. “The crazy old wizard.”

She understands his skepticism. There was a certain level of Force power which did seem indistinguishable from madness, or magic. She’d only felt it twice, once before the so-called “last of the Jedi” and hero of the rebellion, Luke Skywalker, and then again, in the presence of the ghost.    

Not for the first time, Jyn wonders what conspiracy entangles Rey.

Her daughter’s life would be… interesting. She’d known that since before Rey’s birth, the day the ghost—angel? some ethereal alien creature?--came to her like a witch in a fairy tale and offered her a child, after she and Cassian had struggled for years to conceive.

With that, she closes her eyes and opens her mind, the way the ghost had asked her to do if Jyn ever needed him.

 _Will you protect her?_ She thinks it as clearly as she can.

There is silence for a moment as she wonders whether he’d heard her.

And then his strange voice comes into her mind.

_As long as I can._

_How long is that?_ Jyn thinks, gritting her teeth.

A pause.

 _Rey has a_ destiny _, Jyn Erso,_ the ghost says. _You know this. I can only protect her as long as it is the will of the Force._

She seethes inwardly.

_Kark the will of the Force._

She feels his amusement in reply. Across their link it sounds like a chuckle. _Sithspit._ She had not intended him to hear that, but all her thoughts seem to seep through their connection.

_Whatever awaits her here will not be worse than what would’ve happened if she had stayed._

His tone is gentler than she has ever heard it.

But against her will, images from her nightmares come into her mind: this time the interior of a First Order war ship. Rey’s body, barely flickering with life. Beaten and tortured the way her father had been. Still too young to defend herself and not yet awakened to her own power.

And as she see it all again, she feels something click into place that she hadn’t noticed before.

 _You. Your Force presence… or whatever… has always been there. Did you…_ give _me the dreams?_

The reply is swift and defensive.

 _No,_ _I merely augmented them._ _You were not powerful enough on your own to comprehend their meaning went beyond symbolism._

 It gives her a headache to yell inside a Force link, but Jyn feels like yelling.

_You were in my head! I know you were. I sensed you._

He fires back. _To_ help _you remember the dreams, and to see and understand…_

Jyn is reeling. _How can I trust you?_

 _Jyn,_ the ghost says. _As you know, there is a channel between us that was established when your daughter was born. It’s why I hear you when you call to me. While you slept, my premonitions about your daughter leaked into your dreams._

She considers this for a second, feeling him hesitate as well, and when he speaks there is a new tone to his voice in her head.

It’s almost… empathetic.

_Believe me, Sergeant, I am familiar with the experience of a Force dream. They are unpleasant. But as you have found, they are an effective method of persuasion._

Then Jyn feels a wall collapse between them.

She is almost afraid to come closer, wondering if she can directly read his mind.

If he is _allowing_ her.

His thoughts rush at her, jumbled and barely coherent. If she concentrates they are almost like images. Almost like dreams. They shoot down her spine and rattle her rib cage.  

_Jyn._

_There has been an awakening._

_An old and dark power has been freed and will only continue to grow._

She feels rage and pain wax and wane as she rifles through his brain, each emotion more powerful than the next, some as annihilating as a collapsing star.

_When Rey has matured she will be his natural enemy, and he will know. If he finds her before then, he could kill her._

_Or worse._

And there is his fear, small and naked and shivering.

 _She will be turned to the Dark Side, destined to serve him as his apprentice, a capacity lower than any_ slave _._

Her skin feels like it’s on fire.

Inside of her, a small voice asks the question the ghost warned her never to ask.

_Who are you?_

And because she is within his mind, this time there is an answer. She sees it in a single image, one of many that float to the surface. She grabs it first because she recognizes it. 

Orson Krennic’s face, rigid with carefully-controlled terror.

_The ghost… is Krennic’s fear._

Jyn feels her mind working to assemble what she is seeing, never arriving at meaning, but she feels the knowledge itself fluttering just below her conscious understanding the way a hand feels the fabric of a glove.  

Abruptly, the ghost reseals the wall and she is ejected from his mind.

 _You cannot_ know _who I am_ , he says. _You can only_ suspect _._ _It is safer that way._

Jyn nods, dazed.

The outside world is hazing in at the edges of her vision, where she is still clinging to her husband on the back of a speeder. He is talking to her but she can’t hear him yet.

_You must protect my daughter._

Jyn says it like a prayer as she feels her link with the ghost fade. 

“I’m fine,” she hears herself tell Cassian.

“You were distracted, and then it was like you were unconscious for a second,” Cassian is saying. They are still in Plutt’s speeder but have arrived at the spaceport.

It is as though Jyn has one foot in each world as the ghost replies.

_The Force will be with her._

One last image comes across: Rey. No longer crying, she’s in Plutt’s hut playing with some of his junk as though it was a toy. Jyn smiles.

“She’s alright,” she tells Cassian in the real world. “The ghost showed me. He’s watching over her.”

“I’m glad,” her husband says. “I was just worried.”

“I’ll be fine,” she says.

She is not sure she’s fine now. In spite of what the ghost just showed her, her view of Rey’s face as she and Cassian pulled away from Unkar Plutt is burned into her memory.

A fitting punishment for a mother who couldn’t protect her daughter.

But over the next few days, as Jyn and Cassian board a passenger ship bound for the Resistance, as she watches the rings of Jakku’s atmosphere get thinner and lighter as she leaves her daughter behind, she is less sure than she’s ever been that Rey was all hers to begin with.

Of course she carried her for nine months, raised her for four of the happiest years of Jyn’s life (and Cassian’s, she knows) and yet, she has the sudden sense that her daughter belongs to more than just them.

She wonders if Rey’s intelligence and curiosity, her immense power, her dark hair and slight build, were never from the Ersos like Jyn always thought but point to another family entirely, to the connection she does not understand and cannot explain.

To the ghost.

 _She_ is _his,_ Jyn thinks with stunned wonder. _Somehow. She is a… whoever his family is. She is one of them._

 _She_ is _your child, Jyn,_ says the voice of the ghost from afar. _Just as I promised you. And yet…_

Jyn sees a flash of a beautiful woman with dark hair… and Rey’s eyes.

 _My wife,_ whispers the ghost. _She is gone. But our family survives. I cannot show you but they are alive and one day, they will help Rey._

_She is alone for now but there will come a time, when the galaxy is filled with Light once more, when she will never be alone again, but surrounded by kin, both mine and yours. And she will have more family than she ever dreamed of in her wildest fantasies: siblings and parents and grandparents and nieces and nephews. Cousins and second cousins and cousins once removed. Family by love and by blood. The Ersos and the Andors and the Naberries and the…_

Jyn’s mind goes blank as he says his last name.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> A few liberties were taken with how the Force works but many more were taken with how genetics work. I'm so sorry, scientists.


End file.
